Our Vineyard Wedding

I was born near Pittsburgh, PA in 1977. My dad Larry was originally from western Pennsylvania and my mom Patty was born in Ontario, Canada and had lived in Michigan and California before moving east with my father. Since then, they’ve lived in upstate New York, Missouri, Virginia, and currently, Maryland. I have a younger brother, Patrick, who has three children of his own and lives in Missouri. My 96-year-old grandfather Ray (Dad’s side) has lived with my parents for over ten years as well.

I grew up in a very small town near Pittsburgh and later went to middle and high school in another very small town in upstate New York, north of Albany, where I was the valedictorian in 1995. I attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY and majored in Materials Science and Engineering and later, Electronic Media, Arts, and Communication before leaving school in 2000. I was very involved in a college a cappella singing group called The Rusty Pipes, which is how I met all of my groomsmen as well as Michelle and many more of my best friends.

During and after college, I worked in the Albany, NY area as a computer programmer, systems administrator, and wanna-be entrepreneur for several web hosting companies, software firms, and other internet-based startups. In 2003 I moved to Virginia to be with Michelle, worked for a year in IT consulting, then found my current stint as a systems administrator for a small startup internet consulting firm based in Washington, DC that specializes in building online communities for political campaigns, non-profit organizations, and corporations. We currently do work for the United Nations World Food Programme, Service Employees International Union, St. Jude Children’s Hospital, and Senate and Gubernatorial political candidates, among others. I love it tremendously.

My favorite hobbies besides technology and computers are hiking, camping, reading (especially sci-fi/fantasy, history, and biography), traveling, watching movies, and visiting historical places (especially related to the Civil War and WWII, which Michelle’s dad and I do together whenever we can).

Mostly I just like to have fun, work passionately at things I love, and be creative.